Peter Ersts

Software Developer

Research Interests

Research Interests

Peter Ersts is the lead software developer for the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. Mr. Ersts joined the CBC in 1998 to start a GIS and remote sensing facility, which has evolved into the Biodiversity Informatics Facility . Mr Ersts has international field experience in Bolivia, Gabon, Madagascar, Sao Tome, South Africa, The Bahamas , and Vietnam, participating in and leading a variety of data collection activities and teaching workshops on applying remote sensing and GIS technologies to the conservation of biodiversity. Before joining the CBC, Mr. Ersts worked for the NASA Landsat Humid Tropical Inventory Project where he analyzed Landsat data to determine rates of deforestation in the Pan-Amazon Basin and Central Africa.Mr. Ersts earned his degree in computer science, with a specialization in image processing and a concentration in geography, from the University of Maryland. Mr. Ersts now leads the development of desktop and web-based solutions for manipulation, management, analysis and dissemination of biodiversity related data using a variety of languages such as C/C++, Qt, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, SQL and he has previous experience with other languages such as ML, LISP, Assembly, FORTRAN, Pascal and Visual Basic. Mr. Ersts is an advocate of the open source philosophy and is a contributing developer to QuantumGIS (QGIS) , a user friendly open source Geographic Information System.